Settlement Prediction of Ring Foundation under Seismic Conditions

Abstract

The economic and environment-friendly design of foundations without compensating the load-bearing capacity is an issue of concern for most geotechnical engineers worldwide. Ring Foundation is one such foundation that has been designed for supporting heavy or large structures such as silos, wind turbines, bridges, towers, etc, where the conventional shallow foundation is unable to provide the required support. Ring foundations are more economical to build since they use less material than other shallow foundations, which also reduces the carbon emissions caused by the production of cement. These types of foundations enable more even load distribution and improved lateral force and bending moment resistance, which leads to reduced settlement and increased stability. The numerical and experimental study of the bearing capacity of the ring foundations has been performed in the past but the settlement prediction of these foundations is still neglected. This paper focuses on the settlement prediction of the ring foundation on a homogenous cohesionless medium under dynamic loading using pseudo static analysis. A simple 3-Dimensional (3D) numerical model in ABAQUS Cae software is used for the analysis. The effect of variation of the seismic acceleration coefficients (k_h and k_v), the friction angle (Φ) of the soil, and the loading pattern on the settlement of the ring foundation have been studied.